Guilt by Association (17 page)

“I’ve been watching you,” he breathed into her ear, his hands, shielded by the press of people, beginning to roam over her.
“On the surface you’re cool and proper, but I can tell that underneath the high collars and baggy sweaters you’re hot.”

She pushed frantically against the people in front of her, trying to get away from him.

“Wait your turn,” someone snarled at her. “We all want to get home, you know.”

“You’d better leave me alone,” she cried to her pursuer.

“You don’t really mean that,” he cajoled.

“Yes, I do.”

“Your lips may be saying no,” he whispered, “but your body is saying yes.”

“If you don’t stop bothering me,” she shouted at the top of her voice, “I’ll call the police.”

The elderly woman whose purse she had retrieved turned around. “Is that man annoying you, dearie?” she asked.

“Yes,” Karen half-sobbed.

“You leave this girl alone,” the woman advised tartly. “She’s obviously not buying whatever you’re selling.” She shook her head. “A man your age—you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

The bus chose that moment to rumble up to the curb and open its doors. The elderly woman put her arm around Karen and guided her up the steps. The gray-haired man melted into the crowd.

After that, Karen stopped wearing makeup and added bulky coats to her shapeless clothing, regardless of the weather. The more unattractive she could make herself look, the safer she felt.

She quit her job at Lord & Taylor’s. She answered phones for a Madison Avenue advertising agency, typed bills for a Park Avenue dermatologist, stuffed envelopes for a mailorder house, and stacked books at the public library. But nothing seemed to suit her for long. If the work didn’t bore her, some man pursued her, pressing unwanted invitations on her until she sought other employment.

So it was that, in the winter of 1969, she came to the Washington Square Bookery, in answer to an ad for a clerk. The shop,
housed in what the owner called a bunker, was long and narrow and crammed with shelves that boasted volumes on every obscure subject from the aalii shrub to zymurgy. In the back, tucked safely into barrister cases, was a treasure trove of first editions and out-of-print copies of works by such authors as Somerset Maugham, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and Willa Cather.

The owner was a free-spirited woman in her forties with an ample figure, frizzy black hair that she wore in a thick braid down her back, and soft brown eyes that seemed to reflect the suffering of the whole word. The plight of Biafra was foremost in her mind when Karen first met her.

Her name was Doris Ulasewicz, from the Bronx, but there were very few who knew that. Everyone called her Demelza, after some obscure literary heroine she had unearthed.

“She was a woman with the soul of a saint and the heart of
a prostitute,” Demelza explained. “Something about that always appealed to me.”

“I guess it wouldn’t have worked too well if it were the other way around,” Karen observed.

Demelza grinned appreciatively at the young woman. “I think I’m going to like you,” she said.

“Thank you,” Karen murmured, unaccountably pleased.

“Now to business,” Demelza declared. “I’m totally disorganized and brilliantly creative. I’m fine with anything under fifty dollars but absolutely frivolous with anything over that. I tend to fly off in too many directions at once, but I’m great at conceptualization. I’m insatiably curious but I never pry. I need someone to bring sanity to my life and work. Think you could put up with me?”

Karen looked around. The few customers that browsed in the aisles seemed harmless enough, the books seemed friendly and inviting,
and the pungent smell of incense that tried valiantly to camouflage the basement’s mustiness was not unpleasant.

“I could try,” she replied.

“That’s all I can ask of anyone,” said Demelza. “But before you get excited, I’d better tell you that I can’t pay more than eighty dollars a week.”

That was ten dollars less than Karen had earned at the library, and she hesitated. With each job she had held, her salary had increased, if only slightly. Her goal was to be financially free of her parents as soon as possible. Yet here she was,
actually contemplating taking a step in the opposite direction.

“Maybe I can give you a fancy title to make up for it,” Demelza offered, because she had already decided she liked this girl and had long ago learned to trust her instincts.

“What kind of title?” Karen asked, because she had a funny feeling about this no-nonsense woman with the bizarre name and the out-of-the-way little shop.

“Well, let’s see,” Demelza thought aloud. “Suppose we dub you—assistant manager?”

Karen laughed. “My mother will love it,” she said.

“Is it a deal?”

“It’s a deal.”

Karen practically skipped all the way back to West Twelfth Street, wondering why on earth she should be feeling so good about making less money.

“It wasn’t just that I liked Demelza so much,” she explained to Arlene. “It was something about the Bookery, too. I felt really comfortable there. This is going to sound crazy, I know, but it was almost as if the shop spoke to me and told me I’d be happy there.”

Arlene wasn’t a psychology student for nothing. “Then you made the right decision,” she agreed. “As for the salary, well,
as long as your parents don’t mind, why should you?”

In fact, the Kerns were delighted.

“Assistant manager?” her mother exclaimed. “That’s just wonderful, darling. I can’t tell you how proud we are.”

Which translated, Karen knew, into how impressed the neighbors were going to be once Beverly got through massaging the facts,
and the two-woman operation had become a twenty-person staff on the scale of Barnes and Noble.

“And don’t you worry about the money,” her father added from the extension phone. “You’ll get a check from us every month for as long as you need it.”

No one mentioned that this was her seventh job in three and a half years. No one suggested that it would be nice if she would stay in one place for a while. But the words hung in the air as though they had been said.

The focus of Karen’s life had been on marriage and children. It never occurred to her that she would have to work for a living.
The death of her dream left her aimless. The Bookery gave her purpose. She was not stepping into someone else’s shoes that were either too big to fill or pinched her toes—she was creating a totally new position and she found, to her surprise, that she liked it. By the end of a year, Demelza had increased her salary twice.

“I didn’t have any choice,” she freely admitted to her friends and customers. “The girl’s got me so well organized, I couldn’t exist without her.”

Karen had indeed straightened out the accounts and put Demelza on a budget, and never complained about working long hours.
She even developed a plan for increasing business that would draw uptown customers to the out-of-the-way shop.

But, more than that, the two women became friends. The refugee from Great Neck found a lot in common with the expatriate from the Bronx.

“When you’re one of six kids and there’s not enough food to go around,” Demelza said once, after snatching the last doughnut of the coffee break, “you learn to be quick. Then, of course, you learn to get out.”

“When you’re the older of two and getting so much attention you can’t breathe”—Karen sighed—”sooner or later, you have to get out, too.”

“My parents were delighted.”

“Mine were appalled.”

Karen was an avid reader of popular fiction, but now her employer opened her mind to the beauty of the classics that she had heretofore relegated to the category of required reading.

“You have to sample everything to evaluate anything,” Demelza instructed.

So, for a few precious hours each day, she would crawl into someone else’s world and make it her own. Heathcliff haunted her,
Becky delighted her, Inspector Jarret infuriated her, Madame Bovary made her blush, and Anna Karenina made her cry.

In addition to her new fictional friends, Karen got to know the scruffy lot who frequented the Bookery. The women wore long skirts and beaded headbands and attended an assortment of classes. The men wore beaded necklaces and hair below their shoulders.
Many of the younger men were just hanging out, working temporary jobs until their draft numbers came up and it was time to head for Canada. Some of the others were career dropouts, searching for a reason to get up in the mornings. Several, with a foot in each camp, ran soup kitchens down on the Bowery or taught at places like NYU
and Cooper Union. A few composed music or wrote poetry or tried to paint the shapes of their dreams.

Each had a story, and as Karen listened, the ragged clothes, unkempt hair, and shaggy beards disappeared, and she saw instead a group of lost souls, not unlike herself, struggling to find their way in a frequently hostile world.

In the backlash of Camelot, America had splintered into a dozen different subcultures, from the flower children of Haight-Ashbury to the civil-rights marchers of Selma to the drug addicts of Needle Park. Sentiment against the country’s involvement in Vietnam was surging and Demelza defiantly displayed every antiwar poster and cartoon she could find.

The Kerns came to visit the Bookery one afternoon when Karen had been there for two months. It was a rainy Saturday in early April and Beverly, dressed in a bright splash of purple and fuchsia, gushed through the door with her umbrella dripping all over a 1923 issue of
Time.

“My, what a day,” she exclaimed with a shiver. “It’s practically a gale out there.”

“Well, you blew into the right place,” Demelza said cordially, quickly whisking the vintage magazine out of harm’s way. “We have fresh tea waiting to warm you up.”

With cup in hand, Beverly looked around. “Well, isn’t this nice,” she said brightly. “And so … cozy.”

“Cramped, actually,” Demelza corrected her.

“Atmospheric,” Beverly suggested.

“Dark,” Demelza said.

“Don’t your customers find it a little difficult reading in such light?” Beverly could no longer see her hand before her nose without her glasses.

“Heavens, we don’t encourage our customers to read,” Demelza replied, a wicked little smile playing around the corners of her mouth.

“What about Karen? I don’t want her to get eyestrain.”

“Demelza’s teasing you, Mother,” Karen sighed. “There are plenty of lights when we need them, but we think the shop has more ambience this way.”

“And it saves so much on electricity,” the newly budget-conscious proprietor put in.

“Ambience?” Beverly echoed with just the slightest hint of disdain.

“Well, we’re trying for the archival look,” Demelza confided. “You know—dusty, musty, hidden away. Isn’t that where treasures are usually found?”

“Treasures?” Beverly openly sniffed at Demelza’s array of peace and protest posters.

“Let me show you,” Karen beamed, leading her mother off to the special glass cases.

“I don’t know about that woman,” Beverly remarked at dinner several hours later. “She seems very peculiar to me. Don’t you agree, Leo?”

“I didn’t notice anything very peculiar,” Leo replied, attacking his Peking Duck as though it were a root canal.

“She’s not peculiar,” Karen defended her friend and employer. “She’s just a little different, that’s all.”

In the bright light of the Chinese restaurant, Karen wondered where the gray in her mother’s hair had gone.

“Is she
on
something?” Beverly asked.

“What do you mean,
on
something?”

“You know—does she take drugs?”

Karen chuckled. “What do you know about drugs?”

“Oh, I’m not as cloistered as you might think,” her mother retorted. “I know what goes on in the world.”

“Well then, you know more than I do,” Karen replied.

“I smelled a very suspicious odor at that bookshop.”

“That was incense, Mother.”

“Are you sure? It was awfully sharp.”

“I lit it myself, just before you got there.”

“Well, nevertheless, I don’t want you mixed up with anyone who takes drugs.”

“If Demelza takes drugs—and I certainly have no knowledge that she does,” Karen asserted, “she’s never done it at the Bookery.
As long as she signs my paycheck each week,
whatever she might or might not do someplace else is none of my business.”

Which was a neat way of sidestepping the issue, Karen thought to herself now, as the clanking air conditioner began to have some small effect on the stifling apartment. In the four months since that conversation with her mother, she had discovered that many of Demelza’s friends did indeed smoke marijuana and she was pretty sure that her employer did, too.

Karen had to confess that the idea of being around people who used marijuana, or pot or grass or weed, as they called it,
made her a little uneasy. She knew very little about drugs other than that they were addictive and illegal. Once in a while,
someone wandered into the shop behaving a bit off-center, but Demelza usually laughed it off.

The first time, Karen was shocked. “That guy over there looks weird,” she whispered with wide eyes.

“The word is
stoned,”
Demelza told her with a dry chuckle. “Sorry, Peter Pan,” she called to the customer in question, “but this isn’t never-never land.”

Once, Karen watched as two young men at the back end of one of the aisles exchanged money for a small plastic packet containing something that looked like baby powder.

“There’s someone over there selling talcum, I think,” she told Demelza.

This time, the Bookery owner didn’t laugh. “Where?” she demanded and, following Karen’s finger, descended on the two men like a giant bat.

“You’re history,” she cried, grabbing each by an arm and thrusting them in the direction of the door. “We sell books and magazines in here—and that’s all we sell.”

“What was that about?” Karen asked.

“There’s dope and then there’s dope,” Demelza replied. “Some of it’s easy and some of it’s hard. No one deals hard stuff in my place.”

“Why do people use drugs in the first place?”